Illustrator offers this thing called Live Trace.…It takes a piece of pixel-based artwork, which might be something you created in…Photoshop, or maybe you drew it on a piece of paper and scanned it.…Anyway, Live Trace takes the pixels and converts them to vectors.…The advantage is that you can take even a small drawing and enlarge it as much as you want.…For examples, in this chapter you and I will take this smallish sketch and blow…it up to create this ginormous pirate flag.…This is the actual product of this chapter.…

It's flat-out amazing. But don't for a second think that Live Trace is an…automatic art creation feature.…It doesn't replace the Pen tool, it doesn't replace hard work, it…doesn't replace anything.…If you have a rotten little GIF image and you want to convert it to something…smooth and beautiful, Live Trace will not do that.…As usual, garbage in garbage out.…Good stuff in, awesome stuff out.…Here, let me show you what I'm talking about, as well as the best way to exploit…this really amazing feature.…

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Author

Released

11/30/2010

In Illustrator CS5 One-on-One: Advanced, author and industry expert Deke McClelland teaches how to take advantage of the wide array of dynamic features in Illustrator CS5. This course demonstrates how to apply these features to paths, groups, and editable text to create professional-quality artwork. The course covers Live Trace, Live Paint, and Live Color, as well as symbols, gradients, exporting, and integration with Photoshop. Exercise files accompany the course.

Topics include:

Tracing a pixel-based image

Sketching and drawing for Illustrator

Creating and editing gradients

Creating multi-colored blends

Creating seamlessly repeating tile patterns

Creating interlocking artwork with Live Paint

Designing advanced type effects

Recoloring artwork with color harmonies

Making the most of symbols

Integrating Illustrator with Photoshop

Using transparency, blend modes, and opacity masks

Skill Level Intermediate

14h 53m

Duration

780,392

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Q: The instructions for installing the dekeKeys don't work on my computer (which is running Mac OS X Lion). Is there an update to these?

A: The dekeKeys distributed with this course will still work for Lion. You just need to add them to a slightly different folder than in previous versions of OS X.

Open a new Finder window and choose Go > Go to Folder. Type the following file path exactly as written below. Copying and pasting may result in an error.

~/Library/Preferences/Adobe Illustrator CS5 Settings/en_US

Move and/or copy/paste the dekeKeys to this folder and follow the rest of the instructions as outlined in the video, "Installing the dekeKeys keyboard shortcuts."